


the human factor

by irene_addling



Category: Interstellar (2014)
Genre: M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-12-22
Updated: 2014-12-22
Packaged: 2018-03-02 19:51:39
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,942
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/2824076
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/irene_addling/pseuds/irene_addling
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Anything that can…well, it will. The degree of bad can be determined later. (Or, there is a world where Mann was right.)</p>
            </blockquote>





	the human factor

_"The human factor cannot be safely neglected in planning machinery." --Alfred Holt_

Since they moved the base camp down to the surface, since they tested the air times twenty before finally determining that it was safe to step out without their suits, Mann spends a lot of time outside.

The night of Murph’s third video message, the one where her wide, fifty-year-old eyes lit up with excitement for the first time in decades because she’s had a breakthrough, _finally, hang on tight, we will get to you guys soon, I promise, keep transmitting_ , Cooper joins him. It’s the kind of night, back on earth before Cooper was born, when people would kick their heels onto the porch railing and smoke a cigarette, talking late into the night, saying truths that seemed stupid in the daytime. But the last tobacco fields on Earth went fallow sixty years before Cooper left, and smoking would be a horrific, gratuitous waste of oxygen. Besides, nights last too long here to bring out the truth in people.

They still have a porch, though, or at least something close to it. Mann’s sitting on a folding chair outside the capsule, wrapped in a heavy wool blanket. Cooper’s noticed that he’s alone surprisingly often, for someone who claimed to be driven crazy by his prior solitude.

He didn’t realize that he’d mused that thought aloud until Mann turns around with a chuckle and replies, “Force of habit.”

He’s got a thermos in his hands, the same reheated protein blocks he’s been eating in the years since he touched down and Cooper’s already sick of after only a few months, which Romilly wasted water making into a soup tonight in celebration. Liquified, it’s slightly more tolerable, because at least you don’t have to chew it. Mann does not offer him a sip.

“What brings you out here?”

Who the hell knows, Cooper thinks. “Brand was working on her calculations, off of Murph’s data. Thought I’d give her some privacy.”

Mann snorts. “Bet you didn’t get much of that on the way out here.”

“No, we did not.” Cooper grabs another chair and pulls it up. The sunset’s ending, but on this planet, sunsets last two hours. They have plenty of time left for this strange conversation, this boneless stretching of propriety.

Granted, it’s really not much of a conversatio, just because there’s not much to talk about. No movies or books to read, or existential, college-freshman stargazing on the meaning of life. Definitely no small chatter about the family back home.

Cooper looks at Mann, unnaturally haggard, and thinks, family back home. The thought sticks to the back of his head like the remnants of a nightmare in the morning. His lips move of their own accord.

“So why didn’t you have any…connections?”

It’s a stupid question, Cooper knows the minute he asks it. Stupid and rude and presumptuous. For all he knows, the man’s family is dead, rotting away under some cornfield. Most people, with the exception of Cooper, would only take this mission on if they had nothing to lose.

Cooper’s been realizing that there are all kinds of exceptions to the rules out here, but he tries not to dwell on it.

Mann doesn’t respond for a while. It feels like a longer pause than it probably is.

“You know,” Mann says, “when you woke me up. I almost kissed you.”

Cooper waits for his shock, his surprise, his discomfort, to rise within his chest. It doesn’t. Space is a void, and it seems to have emptied out everything it swallows.

“Really?”

“You were the first face I’d seen in years.”

“So it was what, a connection thing? Would’ve planted one on TARS if he’d done the honors?” It was a joke, but not really.

A beat. “Well, you weren't bad-looking, either.” 100% honesty.

 _Oh_. Cooper doesn’t even need to ask what Mann is trying to tell him.

Back on Earth, when the population had reached its all-time low, everyone panicked. “Repopulate the planet” was a joke now, almost, a parental guilt trip for grandkids, now that some kind of (false) confidence had been restored. But it hadn’t been funny when Cooper was a boy. There were four times as many deaths as births, that string of years where the beets and rice failed one by one, and anyone with a brain could tell it was a crisis. So you fucked young, you married young, you had a lot of kids, young. Selling birth control became a felony. Anyone who couldn’t reproduce, or didn’t want to? It was just shy of illegal. Who knew how long Mann had been in hypersleep; he might have taken off in the height of the panic, from the one place where having “no connections” was not a stigma but a job requirement.

“I had a connection. One. I left him on a farm with his wife in Connecticut. It’s been, what, thirty years for you all since I took off?”

“Forty.”

“He’d be dead.”

 _What’s his name._ A pointless question. Neither of them have a chance of getting back to him, anyway, or anyone else. A literal waste of breath. Better to live in the moment, however long that was in some corners of space.

“What’s your name?”

Of all things, that’s finally what startles someone in this conversation. Mann looks up with a start. “Hm?”

“Your name. Your first name. I’ve just realized I don’t know it.”

Another pause, but this time, Cooper was sure it was just as long as he perceived it to be.

“You know,” Mann said, finally, “I thought for a moment that I had forgotten.”

Now it’s Cooper’s turn to be thrown. He turns to look at Mann as he takes a long draught of his protein-soup.

“When I was training, I didn’t make friends, so everyone called me Dr. Mann. Hypersleep messes with your mind. And out here, there was no one to talk to. No one was sending me video messages. It wasn’t allowed.”

“At least you remembered it.”

“It took longer than I would have liked, I’ll admit.” Mann took another sip. “Ryan. Ryan Wendell Mann.”

 _Ryan_. It didn’t feel wrong, persay, but it felt…ominous. Like every piece of information Cooper learned about this man, every word spoken in this strange, honey-slow conversation, was bringing him closer and closer to some sort of edge he couldn’t, wouldn’t let himself fall over.

“Your turn.”

That’s not how it works, Cooper thinks but doesn’t say. Instead, he just clears his throat, and debates for a second whether or not he wants to give this man this kind of power. Brand doesn’t even know his first name, and he doesn’t use hers, one of the many unspoken rules of the mission. Don’t let yourself get vulnerable.

“Joseph.” Because the decision had been made for him, in him, sometime long ago, from the minute Mann grasped for his face when rising from hypersleep. “Never got a middle. My father had more to think about then a second name that would never get used.”

“Do many people use your first?”

“Not many.” He’s always been just Cooper, ever since he was a kid.

“Figures.” Another sip of soup. “So. What are your connections?”

“That’s not how it works.” Cooper says it now.

Mann shrugs. “Tit for fucking tat.”

It’s the first time he’s heard Mann…Ryan swear, pretty much ever. The intensity of it shocks him into wanting to answer, which is maybe the point. Mann’s getting a look on his face now, almost like he’s regretting this whole conversation, and god, Cooper suddenly realizes that _that cannot happen_. He has no explanation for the sudden feeling of dread, or maybe he does, because it’s a flashback to a boy on his old baseball team whose spine curved just right under his too-tight, hand-me-down jersey, and another man in town who ran the general store and always lingered his handshakes with Cooper a little too long, no wife no kids, and really, Cooper should have known better, before this, but scientists hate ambiguity almost as much as they claim to love it.

It’s a bit of a sucker punch. He takes a few moments for a few deep breaths. Mann doesn’t say a word.

“You saw my daughter,” he finally starts. “One son, but he hasn’t sent a message in…well, years for him. Father-in-law’s dead, old age.”

“Wife?”

“Dead. Brain tumor.”

Back on earth, this is where someone would duck their head and pat his shoulder. _I’m very sorry_. But they don’t say it like they’re really sorry, not because they’re bad people, but because everyone’s got dead people now. Most are dead because of famine or scurvy or pregnancy complications, but the principal is still the same. You’ve only got so much grief you can pass out before you loose your own.

This planet is not earth. Here, Mann turns and looks him in the eye. The gaze is sharp. It’s analyzing. It’s…

Hopeful. There’s hope somewhere in there, that’s trying to be quickly buried. Cooper can see it only because he’s witnessed so little of it for so long.

A breath. One of them could strike, but maybe Cooper’s a romantic, he doesn’t want to tip this domino over when it would feel more like a snakebite than a kiss.

“Tell me about your boy. Connecticut.” It comes out all in a rush.

Ryan swallows. “Drove an old, beat-up red car. Laughed a lot more than he should have. Mechanic. Good with his hands. Used to catch him reading books, high-school assignment books, the kind most people would hate reading. He would hide them in the glove compartment of whatever car he was fixing and get in a few chapters on his lunch break. He’d try to deny it, but there would always be soot stains on the edges of the pages.”

“How did you meet him?”

“I’d never not known him. We grew up together. Oldest story in the fucking book, I know.”

“The night you left?”

“I said I would be back in six to eight months. Said goodbye out by the barn silo.”

“Kissed him there?”

“We never kissed.”

There’s nothing else to say, nothing else that won’t painfully stick in Mann/Ryan’s ribcage. He cycles through the two names in the same back-of-skull place that had started this whole thing to begin with. He could not look away from Mann’s face if he wanted to.

_Tit for fucking tat._

The kiss takes Ryan aback. He hasn’t shaved, and neither has Cooper, for that matter. His lips are cold and chapped. The moment tethers on a razor wire for an eyeblink.

Then, Ryan gives in. Because this was bound to happen, has been waiting to happen since Mann’s eyes snapped open onto Cooper’s face, since Cooper left Earth, since his wife’s diagnosis, since the baseball player’s spine. Mann clutches at Cooper’s arms and opens his mouth and it’s suddenly frantic, intense, because as some cynics would say, who else are you going to connect with when there’s only four people in five billion miles of space? But Cooper’s not a cynic. Cooper knows better.

There will be a moment where they will have to break away, open their eyes, go back inside. Everybody’s sleeping quarters are together and there will be no privacy or even, really, many private thoughts, and this thing tonight will have to curdle between them until the next sunset, buried deep under equations and variables and hope.

But moments can be centuries out here. They have, as far as relativity is concerned, plenty of time. 

**Author's Note:**

> Title/opening quote comes from an early explanation of Murph’s law (detailed on the law’s lovely Wikipedia page, because I am a serious writer who does serious, in-depth research).


End file.
